Stunned
by Ginger6
Summary: She was and she wasn't.


Disclaimer: I didn't create 'em but I've been much kinder to them then the people who did. If anyone is earning a penny on this sucker anymore, it sure as heck aint me. 

A/N: While it suggests plenty, I pretty much leave it up to y'all to fill in the blanks so this one's more or less clean. (Second one in a row; I really don't know what has gotten into me lately.) And I fully acknowledge that there's nothing new here, but I needed this so I went ahead and wrote it. Oh, and I seem to have grown weary of dialogue. Don't know what that's about either, except maybe that I have people talking at me all day and, unfortunately, do not possess the power to shut them up.

Stunned, by Ginger

If she had possessed the creativity and imagination to picture this moment, she'd have bet her last dime on the mother of all "gotcha" grins. And she'd have lost big. For even in the dying firelight, she could clearly discern his expression of complete stupefaction as he lay, flushed and panting and disheveled, on the floor of her den. It was enough to make her lips curl into a faint smile as she lay, flushed and panting and disheveled, beside him.

Not that she was in any position to feel smug. It wasn't as though her world hadn't gone careening off its axis. It was simply gratifying to know that his had too. Normally he was unfailingly, irritatingly in control, even when standing at the wrong end of her gun. But not this time: while she could hardly claim to have been in control, she knew that he couldn't either. And that made it "okay" or, at the very least, made it a teeny bit less "not okay."

Seconds ticked by, anyone's guess how many, before he began to pull himself together both literally and figuratively. She mused that there was no way for a man with his pants bunched at the knees to appear dignified. He was comprised of flesh and muscle and bone – a human being, after all – and she realized that it had been a lifetime since she'd thought of him that way. Her cold, often-vicious words had been spoken to conceal the fact that she placed him on a pedestal, considered him the embodiment of everything she wasn't. As she watched him awkwardly pull up his underwear, she marveled at the fact that he was as capable of human frailty as she.

When he sat up to untie his shoes she was only mildly surprised, saying nothing as he removed them, pulled off his socks and kicked off his jeans. Obviously, he'd recovered sufficiently to make a decision, which meant that it was incumbent upon her to make one too. She could feel his eyes on her as she propelled herself into a seated position, peeled off the shredded remnants of her underpants and pulled down her skirt then adjusted her bra to a more dignified and comfortable position. There was no point in trying to close her blouse; the required buttons lay scattered about the room. Pity, she thought as she rose stiffly from the floor, it was one of her favorites.

Her eyes fell dispassionately on the contents of the file she'd been reading, which only an hour earlier had been important enough to sacrifice a Friday evening but now lay in a disordered pile next to the couch. She briefly contemplated the ring forming on the $2,000 mahogany end table, under the barely-touched scotch she'd hastily set down. She was always impatient when it came to their game, which after years of predictability had taken such a dramatic turn when one of them, she couldn't recall who, broke one of the many unspoken rules by venturing too far into the other's personal space.

When her gaze eventually settled on the man sitting at her feet, his eyes were wide and questioning and lacking a hint of arrogance or triumph. Only fair, she figured, since her weapon of choice in situations like this - the icy glare and cynical smile designed to cut someone off at the knees and slam shut the door to intimacy - was, for only the second time in her life, utterly beyond her reach. Instead she reached for something else.

0 0 0 0

She led him into the darkness of her bedroom and, in the first civil exchange since his arrival and the first coherent words spoken in over half an hour, asked him if he needed to use the bathroom then directed him to the location of a clean towel and toothbrush. Absurd little courtesies, she thought as his hand slipped diffidently from hers and he muttered a soft thank you. This could be any old Friday night, she pondered, completing her usual ritual of neatly turning down the bed. Then the water went on in the bathroom to underscore the point that it was anything but. She sighed, pausing a moment before padding softly to her armoire.

The door opened and the light emanating from the bathroom revealed the remaining uncertainty that was written all over his face. Passing him on her way to the bathroom, she placed her hand on his bare shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze while nodding in the direction of the bed. The warmth of his skin and the way he trembled beneath her touch made it difficult to breathe, but she forced herself to exhale before moving away from him and closing the door behind her.

Appraising her reflection, she smoothed her hair then straightened the delicate straps of a silk nightgown of blue so pale that when the light hit it just right it appeared almost silver. Exquisite and rarely worn, it had been a gift from a man who loved her, a man who said he'd picked it out because the color reminded him of her eyes. That man had himself been a gift from the man now slipping into her bed. She wondered without irony whether she'd finally buckled under the pressure and lost her mind or if she was doing the first truly sane thing in years.

Hitting the light switch on her way out of the bathroom she entered the bedroom in darkness. Panic rose as she approached the bed but she steeled herself and propelled forward to turn on the lamp on the bedside table. There's nothing like facing one's deepest fears and what she'd feared most from the moment the game had begun were those unmercifully soulful eyes that would so often haunt her as she'd attempt to close her own eyes at the end of a long, depressing day at the office.

It wasn't the pain, desperation, disappointment or anger that had so haunted her but the other component, the one that was always present along with and in spite of the other things. It was what she had seen the very first time she looked into his eyes when youth, innocence and complete ignorance of the realities of their lives had made it possible to feel something other than fear. It was what she was seeing right now as he sat patiently, silently waiting for her to join him in her bed.

0 0 0 0

Floating somewhere between sleep and wakefulness she smiled. It was Saturday, which meant that every endorphin-fed cell in her body could stay put for as long as she wished. As she stretched, pleasingly sore muscles made their presence known, bringing her more fully into consciousness. Sighing contentedly and burrowing deeper into the bed she mused that only one thing could make the moment any better and, before she could even complete the thought, that thing materialized. She hummed approvingly as the smell of freshly brewed coffee wafted into the room then opened her eyes.

There he stood at the foot of her bed, tray in hand, wearing an Egyptian cotton robe commandeered from her armoire and casting an aura of someone feeling completely, absurdly at home only a few short miles from the site of his 30-year incarceration. Apparently, all it took was a few tender caresses to wipe away his uncertainty. Okay, so it had been more than a few: they had explored every square inch of one another before succumbing to exhaustion shortly before dawn.

There had been words too: whispered pleas and approbations, as well as soft conversation when they were not otherwise engaged. It was amazing how quickly the walls went tumbling down after the initial breech in the den. Or maybe they had been removing bricks one-by-one since the beginning and had simply reached the point of catastrophic structural failure when he turned up to challenge her about the latest nasty little family secret with the requisite links to an even nastier international conspiracy.

It was a concept worth pondering but she was interrupted by a sharp pang of hunger followed immediately by an audible growl. It was then that she noticed the perfectly poached eggs and golden slices of toast on the tray with the coffee. She looked up in time to see the expression on his face as he leaned over to set down the tray, obviously pleased to have an opportunity to meet another of her basic needs.

FIN


End file.
